“Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training.”

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they’d word something or how they’d inflect it.

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, ‘It was a perfect script for she and I,’ inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, ‘Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?’

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

Great humorists are great insulters.

Greatly talented performers don’t know – often spectacularly – what’s best for them, don’t know what their talents really are, and don’t know what’s just plain wrong for them.

It’s not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

It’s a tribute to the human brain that anyone is able to function out there on television in a talk situation that is entirely artificial.

My dream was maybe someday, one night I can be a guest on a talk show, and then I will have achieved everything I want.

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-’60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn’t the night before.

Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing – nothing at all or in any way – be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.

It’s no fun being a specimen.

It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.

Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it’s painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it’s extremely painful.

Astrology is not an art, it is a disease.

The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America.

I’m a sworn enemy of convention. I despise the conventional in anything, even the arts.

I really can’t speak on others, but in a sense, I feel like every artist always has their problems with the industry because we all want to have our creative way.

I consider myself an artist, which is, like, the most played term, but I believe it.

I feel like Houston is one of the leading things in music culture. Everyone loves the Houston culture. It needs to have its own monument, its own moment for artists like me, artists like Beyonce who set it off.

I see hip-hop as going in a self-managing place. It’s very culturally controlled and artist-controlled. It’s not really based on a label anymore. Everything is pretty much in the control of the artist. Which is amazing.

It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.